CIO Agenda for 2011

CIO Agenda for 2011: 6 Key points that will form the IT Strategy this year

World has changed post recession, so has the IT strategy. Change in consumer taste and preferences, competitor’s strategy and market expectations has impacted business strategies across the board in the organization. Closely aligned to these business strategies is the technology matrix. CIOs have finalized IT strategy and agenda for the year 2011. Based on my reading of the market, below are the 6 noteworthy points that will form CIO’s strategy this year.

1) Execution – Budget has finally stated flowing in and many companies embarked on a roadmap for improvement was defined last year. Projects halted due to cost pressure regained funds. Three to five year strategies were defined and laid out and careful investment plans were rolled out. This year is the year of execution where the organization needs to make sure that project delivery happen in time. IT companies will observe demand for Project Management and governance roles this year.

2) Strategic Partnership – With strategic plan comes the need for a long term strategic partner. Leading companies do have prime partners to support, however maturing companies are still seeking out for partners. IT partner will bring focus, experience, best practices, methodology, excellence and capacity to accomplish and execute long as well as short term plans.

3) Breaking down investments – During tough times, CIOs  faced a massive challenge breaking down fixed investments done most importantly on Hardware side. There will be a move to make fixed investments elastic to enable demand based payment and utilization. SaaS (Software as a Service), Cloud computing and such pay as you use models will gain investments. Gartner expects this year to be a unique time for IT as CIO strategies focus on new architectures and the potential of these lighter-weight technologies. 

4) Lean Processes - Drive to make lean processes will continue. Recession realized CIOs that there has been a lot of room to squeeze out capital by optimizing processes. IT will be excessively leveraged to drive lean processes. BPM (Business Process Management) tools will help CIOs better align IT with business processes and subsequently consolidate IT systems.

5) Competitive Advantage – Over the next five years, CIOs expect dramatic changes in IT as they adopt new technologies and raise their contribution to competitive advantage. Solutions with that will provide competitive advantage and high on impact will gain priority over ongoing transactional development. Use of mobility solutions to improve sales or delivery productivity can be termed as an example under competitive advantage solution. Due to the vary nature of it, such solutions will get immediate sign-off from business and finance units. It becomes important to keep a tab on Gartner’s hype cycle to differentiate the noise from productive solutions.

6) Skill Change – Leaders will implement new infrastructure technologies to achieve both increased efficiency and to redirect IT resources to create greater business impact. Significant role change in IT organizations is expected as analysts foresee big change in technology and architecture in coming years. This would make CIOs think about existing IT skill base and change management within the organization in anticipation of the changes that might take place in next few years.

Cheers,

Nishchal Khetarpal

HCL America Inc.